Rick Barot

Rick Barot was born in 1969 in the Philippines, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and later served as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. His poems have been honored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and regularly appear in such journals as New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Threepenny Review. Barot’s first book is The Darker Fall (Sarabande, 2002). Formerly the Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer at George Washington University and the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College, Barot now lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches both in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Many Are Called

to burn at least one thing they once owned: she tears

the page from his book and sets light to whatever

she said to him there, words to smoke, paper

to black snow. She would like a sleep as big as

a building, whose key she firmly keeps in her hand,

its teeth writing into her palm. Be as nothing

in the floods, I read yesterday on the bus home,

which was a way of saying that in the dimmed glass

all of us and none of us could be found. But one

face was like sun reflecting on ice, lit by what

the Walkman poured into it, its champagnes. One

made me think of the mushroom in the woods

like a face pressed to a photocopier’s flash,

the face and its goofy pain. Many are called to save

what they can: he rolls up his pants and wades

into the fountain, where the gull has its leg caught

on a wire. The bird flaps away to join the wheeling

others, their strokes on the air like diacritical

marks over the sentences uttered below them.

A friend writes about how cold he had been, nearly

drowned in the spring-melt river when the horse

tipped over. It is months away now, but still

I have him there, in the darkening field, the fireflies

a roused screensaver. Many are called to close

upon themselves like circles: Kafka, waking because

a dog is lying on him. He doesn’t open his eyes

but he can feel its weight, its paw smelling

faintly of hay. Or the woman crying in the park,

her shopping cart tumbled, shoes and cans spilled out

like junk from a shark’s stomach. Or the man

walking home along the houses and the lawns

of his sadness: If there must be a god in the house…

Under the new trees and the new moon of his sadness:

He must dwell quietly. Many are called to form

a deity out of what they know: he quizzes me

on the capital of every African country, he paints

his toenails silver because I ask him. A friend writes

about the church where a fresco will always show

them: cleanly naked at first, then full of the blame

of their own guile, then clothed, worried with age,

the woman in her room setting fire to something

she had, the man in the meadow, wishing his rib back.

Eight Elegies

I.

One kind of rain gets to be

exactly the rain you want, disbursing

lightly in its fall an atmosphere

that you walk into as into

a confetti rain, getting kissed while

umbrellas click like flashbulbs around you.

II.

She said, “I want whatever CD was in

the player, the shirt that was on the hook

in the closet, the earrings he gave me

that I gave back, the ugly

painting I made of him.”

Her friend made sure to put back

the yellow police tape he had to take down

when he went for the things.

III.

Once, during a Midwestern blizzard,

I let in two Mormon missionaries

because I didn’t want them believing

that the snow, the doors closed against them,

were a form of extra credit. Each one

was an Adam in a blue suit, blond,

clear-faced. Their bodies, because I spent the hour

imagining them, were clean as statues:

above the hipbone, above the knee, a cord

of muscle; each shoulder was soap-smelling.

I made coffee and tried to listen,

my stomach felt raw with meanness.

Later, telling a friend the story, I understood

I had failed at a charity

that went beyond having faith.

We were by the river, the water full of broken

ice-plates. My friend told about

his grandmother scolding him for ironing

a shirt’s bottom, the part that would get wrinkled

anyway. The snow, held briefly,

faded into the heat of his hair.

IV.

Wanting death, which of the senses

would the mind kill first?

My sister’s lover, tying knot after knot

in practice, would he have heard

the traffic humming in the air,

the steady undercurrent? Would he have felt

the cat’s tongue, the sandpaper

dampness against his arm?

Did memory, shaking away bracelets

and scents, leave the room?

And love, piece by piece, light as a nest?

V.

In a poem I keep returning to,

there is so much hunger

that a man gets killed for the few bills

he has in his pockets. In the café,

telling himself to leave something

for the waiter, the murderer has a blizzard

of words in his head: coffee

and toast muddling into rum and fare.

What always startles me

is that he should have any words

coming to him at all, the words

composing the day and all that he did in it.

The same way, blocks from home

and not about to turn back, I’m stuck

thinking of coat. Or my sister,

in the restaurant kitchen where she works,

thinking into knife and basil

so clearly that she becomes the knife,

becomes the basil. In a book

of paintings I look at, there’s a color

the artist calls gris clair,

a color like onionskin floating on water.

In one painting the sky is this color,

with hills below overlapped in vellum shapes.

I think of the painter going home, exhausted

by his own attention: gray, boulder,

night and hydrangea, each word

completed by his love and by his care.

VI.

I slept there once, his walk-up room

a perfect brick cube.

The wood floors were scratched at

as though an animal had been kept there.

The windows had an airshaft

view, and opened to the noise

of air conditioning and the quarrelling

of taxis. I woke to humidity,

heavy as a blanket on me.

The air smelled of cat litter and diesel.

But walking out of the building,

to every color the day had,

I knew I was in a great city.

VII.

She didn’t open the small box,

put it on the floor so that

in a few weeks the things of her room

seemed to pity it: first surrounding it

like figures around a fire,

then covering it altogether, the shopping bags

and the coats, the sweaters, the socks.

VIII.

One kind of rain has you

at the bus-stop at five o’clock,

on the sidewalks a gruel of newspapers.

Walking there from work, I had seen

an old man suddenly stop,

bend to the gutter, and let out

a yellow sleeve of vomit.

The rain wasn’t snow

but seemed determined to be.

I wanted the day spooled back,

all the way back, to the dark under

the dresser, the dark inside cabinets,

inside suitcases and bottles,

all the way back, to the night

I argued with a friend’s voice on the phone,

went outside to have a cigarette,

and saw the woman made-up

so garishly that there was no question

she meant to have you look

at the orange pile of hair,

the red pumps, the trailing tinsel boa,

her quick soft laugh carrying now

night into night into night.

Reading Plato

I think about the mornings it saved me

to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows

of the bus, or at the initials scratched

into the plastic partition, in front of which

a cabbie went on about bread his father

would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,

or told one more story about the plumbing

in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,

his whole childhood in a building, nothing to

love but how much now he missed it, even

the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue

suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead

opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heart

and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness

because there was one you or another I was

leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers

and fruit going past, figures earnest with

destination, even the city itself a heart,

so that when sidewalks quaked from trains

underneath, it seemed something to love,

like a harbor boat’s call at dawn or the face

reflected on a coffee machine’s chrome side,

the pencil’s curled shavings a litter

of questions on the floor, the floor’s square

of afternoon light another page I couldn’t know

myself by, as now, when Socrates describes

the lover’s wings spreading through the soul

like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much light

I think about, but the back’s skin cracking

to let each wing’s nub break through,

the surprise of the first pain and the eventual

lightening, the blood on the feathers drying

as you begin to sense the use for them.